Ok, I put some new pictures up from this weekend, and a few from last weekend.

I found out what the deal was with those ladybugs I saw on Ford Ridge--apparently, they're hibernating. I didn't know that ladybugs hibernated, let alone that they lived long enough to hibernate all winter. It's strange that they'd pick a wind-scoured mountain peak that receives so much snow in the winter that you need a snow cat to get there. I guess they're heartier than I thought.

I didn't go on that drive yesterday--at least, not to where I wanted. We passed through the gate and approached a creek crossing, and Traci and I decided we didn't like the looks of the road and the weather, so we turned back. Instead of going home, however, we drove further up Price Canyon, and took the turnoff to Ford Ridge. The road wasn't as good as I expected--there was a lot of exposed bedrock along the way that was really rough on my car. We got to the top, and it was just beautiful up there. There was a benchmark among the radio towers, so I took a picture of that, and I took quite a few pictures looking back towards the highway and looking south towards Consumers.

After that, we headed east along Ford Ridge to another peak that was supposed have a benchmark at its top. That road wasn't as well maintained as the main road, and I really beat my car up on that one--one of my mud flaps got knocked off by a rock, so I need to re-attach that when I get a chance. I went as far as the road would take me, then hiked the rest of the way while Traci and Michael stayed in the car. The hike looked deceptively easy from the car, but as I hiked up, the place that appeared to be the top turned out to be a knoll that was only a quarter of the way up. When I finally got to the top, I couldn't even see the car, and our FRS radios could barely reach each other. The benchmark was supposed to be a triangle chiseled on a rock embedded in the ground, but at the summit was just a huge pile of rocks (wide, not tall). I spent 45 minutes looking around the area, then digging through the pile of rocks, but I never found the benchmark. I was freaked out for a second as I first started digging through the rock pile. I picked up a rock, and there were hundreds of ladybugs crawling all over each other in a huge mass. Under nearly every rock I picked up was a similar crawling mass of ladybugs, there were probably hundreds of thousands of them within a 20 foot radius. It was quite strange. I'll post some pictures of my trip soon.

As I was posting that last entry, Greymatter decided to shit a brick. I didn't realize that the server this site runs on keeps access log files indefinitely, and they haven't been purged since Solo started hosting me in March of last year. So I hit my disk space quota right as Greymatter tried writing that last post to disk, and it hosed everything. Well actually, it just hosed gm-entrylist.cgi and gm-counter.cgi, both of which I had to rebuild. The counter was easy, I just had to do some simple math to get the numbers right. But the entry list was a bitch. I had to start with a backup copy from more than a month ago, and manually add the last 30 or so entries that I've made. I guess if you're not intimately familiar with Greymatter, none of this makes sense to you. Suffice it to say that I just spent an hour getting everything back to normal. But it was nothing compared to the hell I went through a year ago, when I started adding entries to Greymatter from News Publisher and Blogger, and even my old hand-written entries. I need to make backups more often.

I was planning on looking for a benchmark to two today, then spending the rest of the day relaxing, but I ended up working my ass of instead. I've been busy from the time I woke up until just a few minutes ago. I moved my camper and trailer to the back of my property, and drained the water from the holding tank in the camper, among several other "winterization" things. I also put a new thermostat in my truck, and changed the oil (the bastard took almost 7 quarts). I lost about a gallon of coolant while changing the thermostat, so I refilled it with pure antifreeze, since I'd added about that much water earlier this summer when I took the old thermostat out.

I wanted to pump a few rounds through my handgun when I finished up today, but not only am I tired, it's already getting somewhat dark outside. I'll probably go tomorrow after I get back from "the highest point of the long ridge between Emmas Park and Price River Valley." I'm going to make another attempt at that benchmark that I tried for last weekend. This time, I'm going armed with a satellite photo, a topo map, written directions, and my mountain bike, just in case my car can't make it all the way. I'm also going armed with my 9mm--it's the same place I was afraid to go this summer because of mountain lions and bears. I've heard other people tell me they've seen or heard mountain lions in this canyon, and I've personally seen bear tracks in the area. I wish I'd have bought some hollow points, 'cause all I've got now is ball ammo. Oh well, at least there's no risk of a bullet passing through an animal and hitting somebody else--and nobody will be around to hear me scream.

I bought a couple-hundred rounds of ammo, a locking case, and a cleaning kit for my gun yesterday. I think I'm going to clean it right now, because it hasn't been done since I fired it last weekend, and I honestly don't know if I'll actually fire it again tomorrow.

Linux OS + GPS Receiver + Wireless Network Connection = Automatic Vehicle Location. This is a pretty cool idea, especially if it's made available to the general public.

I was just pulling out of the Wal-Mart parking lot yesterday evening, and a little storm had quickly moved over town. It was raining just a bit, and the wind was blowing really hard. Right as I got my speed up on Main Street, a huge gust of wind hit and blew one side of the lighted Pizza Hut sign completely out of its frame. It hit the road and broke into pieces, several of which I ran over in my car. I just laughed my ass off--being in the right place at the right time, and running over the Pizza Hut sign--it was just too funny.

Yeah, this about sums it all up.

"A law enforcement officer's job should not be sitting around at a speed trap all day."

Ok, being an adult officially sucks. Back in the day, I never had to worry about neighbors, lawyers, house payments, offspring, changing the oil in my truck, employment, mowing the lawn, insurance, painting the house, cutting down weeds, etc. What I wouldn't give to be 8 years old again, when the only thing I had to worry about was keeping the tires on my bike from going flat, and being home in time for dinner. Of course, if I knew then what I know now, I would have made much better use of my time. But still, there are times I wish I could just go back to being as carefree as I was then.

Ok, time to go to bed. I gotta get up early for work and make a few bucks.

Check out this article about "Amendment A" in South Dakota, an initiative that will allow juries to question the laws under which a person has been charged, not just whether or not that person broke the law. It would allow juries to agree that technically, somebody may have broken the law, but if the law is completely asinine, they may still acquit that person. It makes sense for drug possession cases and other "victimless crime" cases, though not necessarily for violent and other such crimes.

Here's what gets me, though: "Opponents of the amendment, which include most of the establishment bar in South Dakota, say it is antidemocratic in allowing a small group of people to decide the wisdom of a law." What is the state legislature then? Certainly not a large group of people that decides the wisdom of the law. Sure, they represent the people of the state, but they're still a small group of people who believe they can tell other people what's right and what's wrong for them. And in the case of most drug laws, Utah's alcohol laws, and many other ridiculous laws that exist around the country, a jury should have the power to decide whether or not the person being tried did anything wrong, not just whether or not they broke a law.

Here are two more articles on the matter.

On Saturday, Traci and I went looking for several benchmarks in and around Price Canyon. There were six of them that I planned on looking for, but we only had time to find three. The first one took us nearly two hours, even though it was within about 200 yards of where we parked the car. We had to climb down an embankment to the Price River, then we ended up hiking about 1/2 mile upstream until we found a place to cross. After we hiked back downstream on the other side and took some pictures of the benchmark, we decided to hike downstream this time, hoping to find a closer place to cross the river. Well, we had no such luck, and after going another 1/2 mile or so, we just decided to get a little wet rather than trying to find a place where we could walk on rocks to cross the river. What's stupid about the whole thing is that there was a bridge over the river about a mile down from the benchmark, and we simply could have walked along the railroad tracks for that mile to the benchmark, then back along the tracks to the car, and it would have saved us about an hour. That would have given us time to at least drive up to Ford Ridge and find the two benchmarks up there, which were easily reachable by car.

Yesterday, I just got really bored and decided to try to find another benchmark that is literally in the middle of nowhere. There's a dirt road that I believe leads there from Kenilworth, but the road is in such bad condition that you need a really big 4X4 to make it very far. Even if my truck had a front driveshaft, I don't know whether or not it would be able to go up that road. There's another road that may lead there from Indian Canyon, but it's gated off, and there's a maze of roads between there and the benchmark, so I'm not sure I could find my way without getting lost. The gate was unlocked last time I checked several months ago, but I haven't been up there since. I have a feeling that road is in as bad of shape as the road leading up from the south, but I won't know until I try. Anyway, I was looking around on TerraServer yesterday trying to find a different route, one that seems easier, and I actually found one (or so I thought). There's a road that goes east from US-191 near the junction with Emma Park Road, and according to both the topo map and the satellite photo, there should be a road that turns south off that road and leads directly to the ridge on which the benchmark is placed. I found the exact spot where the road was supposed to branch off to the south, but I couldn't actually see a road. Not only that, but there was a fence and a creek that I couldn't see any way around either. I didn't bring any printed maps with me, so I wasn't sure at the time that I was at the correct spot, so we continued east on the primary dirt road, looking for the correct place to turn south. We never did find that road, though after returning home and looking at the maps again, I'm certain I was at the right spot the first time. We eventually went very far to the east, and sunset was approaching quickly, so we decided to head back towards the west and US-191. I was pissed off that we had gone so far, on such a shitty and washed-out road, and didn't accomplish anything.

After we got home, I went back to looking at some topo maps to figure out just where the hell I had gone in comparison to where I had planned on going. I assumed that maybe I'd taken the wrong road east, and that's why I never found the road that turned south, but that wasn't the case--I just couldn't find the correct road. Here's the stupid part (there always seems to be a stupid part)--if we'd continued driving east along the road, rather than turning around and going back to US-191, we would have reached Nine Mile Canyon after about a mile! That means I could have been on a paved road within 10 minutes, instead of taking 45 minutes going the opposite direction. Then it would have simply been a 20 minute drive back to Wellington, then another 10 or so back to Price. That would have made the entire trip worth it--taking a dirt road basically between Helper and Wellington--but instead, I'm feeling pissed off for wasting an entire evening doing nothing.

I fed 50 rounds through my handgun today, and it performed perfectly. I was not only told by Ty, but I had read online that I should expect my P-11 to jam or misfeed a couple times during the first hundred rounds or so, but that isn't the case so far. I probably won't have the money to buy more ammunition until I get paid at the end of the month, but at least I got my xmas shopping done early. =) Wal-Mart sells a 100-round box of Winchester 9mm 115 grain full metal jacket target/range ammo for $10.58, so that's what I plan on practicing with since the price is right and they seem to work well in my gun. A 20-round box of Federal Hydra-Shok 135 grain jacketed hollow points goes for $11.50 at Sportsman's Warehouse, but I haven't checked to see if Wal-Mart even carries them. I hope so, because I'd hate to buy the overpriced stuff at the sporting-goods store around here, if they even carry them.

I plan on practicing with my 9mm every week until I feel comfortable with it, and then just every so often to keep my aim straight. I'd like my wife to shoot it just as often, but she doesn't really like it that much. I don't really know what she was expecting, but she'd prefer to shoot a .22 semi-auto than our 9mm. I'll probably have to buy her one of those before she'll let me get another handgun. And next time, I think I'll go for a Glock 9mm, then a Glock .45 after that. Of course, I really need to replace my old broken .22 semi-auto rifle, and I'd also like to replace my 16-guage shotgun with a 12-guage pump. All that's probably far-off into the future anyway. :(

The first sure sign that winter is fast-approaching: I turned my furnace on this morning. I remember what seems like a month ago--actually the beginning of spring--when I was making plans for the summer. I was going to clean out my garage and haul a bunch of stuff to the landfill. I was going to completely landscape the area around my back lawn, and till and level the back portion of my lot. There were so many things I was going to do, but it seems like summer just flew right by.

I might still have time to do some of those things, but I don't know if I'll feel like it with the weather we've been having lately. But last year, I took my evaporative cooler down when the weather got cold like this, and a few weeks later it warmed up enough that I was wishing I'd waited. Pretty soon, I'll have to take the cooler down, drain the sprinkler system (something I made the big mistake of not doing last year), and park the camper in the back yard, cover it with a tarp, and drain the water tank (another mistake from last year). Next thing you know, I'll be complaining having to shovel snow.

I went on a hike in the hills above Helper yesterday, and when I returned home my wife told me that Pinnacle Sports had called, and that my P-11 was in. I was pretty surprised that it only took them three business days to get it. The owner of the store liked the handgun enough that he ordered an extra one to keep in stock. After filling out all the paperwork and waiting for the background check (which for some reason I was nervous about), I walked out with my very own 9mm handgun. I put a couple of pictures up here, along with some other miscellaneous pictures I've taken in the past week.

The clutch on my Subaru is starting to slip, and I'm afraid I'll end up having to replace it soon. What's strange is that it only slips in 5th gear doing around 55 MPH, but when starting out in 1st gear and/or accelerating hard, I don't have any problems. If it goes out completely, I'm going to try replacing it myself, because it's not worth putting $500 into a car that I paid only $800 for. If I can't do it myself, I'll just replace the car with another disposable car. =)

Chris and Tom each posted aerial pictures of their respective dwellings after my recent post about TerraServer and mapping, so I figured I'd do the same. Except in my picture, I've pointed out pretty much everybody I know within a few blocks of my house. It's strange that so many of the people I know around here live (or lived) within a rectangle six blocks tall and only two blocks wide. Well, maybe not so strange, seeing as how their proximity is the reason I know most of them. Anyhow, here is the picture.

Finally, somebody makes a decent popup ad killer. So far, this one has worked perfectly for me--it disallows automatic popups, but when I click a link that creates a popup, it allows it to appear. The really nice thing about the way it kills popups is that it preempts them, rather than allowing them to partially load before killing them--you never even see the popup window. I've only been using it for a couple of hours, but it appears to be the perfect popup killer.

I find it amusing that this article (last one on the page) describes Helper as "urban." Helper is about as rural as it gets.

One of the best quotes I've heard in a long time: "As of right now, the most dangerous effect of marijuana possession and use is jail."

The First Smiley :-) -- link found via news.com.

I'm in the process of downloading each USGS 7.5 minute topographic map for the entire state of Utah. I've been doing it in my spare time during the past week or so, and I've got eight degree blocks finished so far, with fifteen remaining. That's about 500 maps out of almost 1500 total. They average about one meg apiece, so I'll probably end up using three CDs when I burn them. I'd like to eventually buy all the paper quads for the state, but that would be pretty costly. Someday, though...

For some reason, the site I've been leeching these off of doesn't have a high-res image for the Price and Pinnacle Peak quads, so I decided to piece my own together using TerraServer. I viewed the topo maps as large as I could on TerraServer, then copied each image and pasted it into a 4000 X 4000 pixel image in Photoshop. When I got done with each one, I had over 40 layers, and Photoshop was using up over 300 megs worth of scratch disk space. Since TerraServer serves its images up as JPGs, I had to change the image mode to indexed color, using the exact same color table as the PNGs that I was downloading, but they still didn't come out right--the images I created had a lot of dark purple where they should have been black. Anyway, after all that work, I found out that a different site has all the Utah quads in GIF format--they're of a slightly worse quality than the PNGs I've been downloading, but it would have been better to use one of those GIFs than making my own images from scratch.

This is exactly the reason why people "cop an attitude" with police (from this article):

"According to police sources, all three men at first were uncooperative - denying consent to search the car.

'It was probably not the right time for them to be copping an attitude with police,' said one federal law enforcement source who was up all night monitoring the investigation. 'But that's exactly what happened.'"

So, according to this cop, there's a right time and a wrong time to exercise your rights against unlawful search and seizure? If the police had enough cause to search the vehicle, they should have obtained a warrant and done it the right way. To say that it's "not the right time" is just wrong.

Link stolen from Fark, where there's a thread going on about this same topic.

I think I'm finally going to get a Kel-Tec P-11 9mm handgun pretty soon. I went down to a new sporting goods store they have here in town, and they said they could get one in about two weeks, and it'd cost around $250. I was thinking about waiting until next week when I go into work to check the Provo/Orem area to see if anybody has that particular handgun in stock, but the more I thought about it, the more I doubted anybody will have one. And that would set me back three weeks instead of two, so I'll probably order mine either today or tomorrow.

Cabela's has 300 rounds of 115-grain full metal jacket reloads for $40, or about 13 cents per round. I'll definitely be getting those, plus probably a box of Federal 135-grain Hydra-Shok JHPs for carrying.

Of course, I'll have to get my concealed firearms permit, a locking case for the gun, an inside-the-waistband holster, at least one spare magazine, and probably many other accessories. Most of that will have to wait, though, because I can barely afford the actual handgun as it is.

I reworked the benchmarks section. Now I need to get busy on a couple of other neglected sections of my site.

Hahah...there's some great commentary about that tarnadey on Fark.

Tornado strikes Manti, Utah. Maybe God is sending those polygamists a message.

I did a slightly foolish thing today, but I had a whole lot of fun doing it. I took Traci and Michael benchmark hunting in the San Rafael Swell, which normally wouldn't be a bad thing if the weather was good. It's been raining around here a lot lately, and there was a lot of flash flooding there today. The dirt road crossed one wash and had a concrete bottom to keep from washing out, and there was about 4 inches of water flowing through there, but the Subaru of course had no problems getting through.

Later on in the drive, we turned off the main road onto a rocky little road that led to the top of Little Cedar Mountain. It was a dead-end road, and right after we turned onto it, we crossed a normally dry creek bottom that had about six or eight inches of water running through it only a few feet wide. The water was low enough that I could pick my way through the rocks in the creek bottom, and I just took it nice and slow until we were on the other side. We could see that another storm front was heading our way, but decided to press on anyway. It probably took us 15 or 20 minutes to get to the top of the mountain, where we spent about 10 minutes taking pictures, then headed back. Not surprisingly, the creek had risen another foot or so, and was about 15 feet wide. Our only choices were to wait until the water level went back down, or barge through and hope we made it to the other side. I had no desire to be stuck out there until it stopped raining, since the weather forecast calls for rain until well into next week. I got a run at the creek, and we barrelled through without any apparent problems. We turned back onto the main road and headed east towards Buckhorn Wash, and when I got my speed up to about 40 MPH, I realized that the car seemed to be riding too roughly for how nice the road was. I stopped and got out of the car to check the tires, not really expecting to have a flat, but checking just in case. I noticed a hubcap laying about 50 feet to the left of the road. Then I realized it was a Subaru hubcap. The two left-side wheel covers were still on the car, so I walked around to the right side and saw that the right-rear was completely flat. There was a huge gash in the sidewall, which I must have gotten driving through the creek. So I had to change the tire in the pouring rain, which wasn't very comfortable.

After I changed it, we drove on and took the turnoff north towards Cleveland. I stopped to take some pictures on Jackass Flat, which is normally dry as a bone, but it had been turned into a huge lake. There were areas where the road was partially washed out or just flooded, but luckily the road was passable. As I was taking some pictures, a car that we'd passed earlier going in the opposite direction approached us going the same direction. The guy driving asked me if I knew where that road led to--apparently he had tried leaving the way we had come from, but that first wash we had crossed was impassable. I'm glad I know my way around the area, or else I would have been freaked out by all the flooding.

Getting a flat tire sucked a little bit, but it made the experience that much more memorable. And I got some great pictures out of the deal, plus I found six benchmarks out of the seven I tried looking for.

Five instances of the word "affect" in this article, and only one of them is the correct usage. People pay to read this newspaper. And don't even get me started on "it's" versus "its."

My DSL has been going extremely slow today. So much so, that I haven't even used my computer since I got off work until just now. Here's a screenshot from my FTP client, showing the progress of a 14 MB download that's been going for over two hours now. At this rate, I'll have to leave my computer on overnight just to finish the download. I sure hope it's back to normal by tomorrow, or else there'll be no Fark Photoshopping for me. :(

Update: Here it is not 20 minutes later, and everything's up to normal speed. Right before I made this post, I emailed my ISP's tech support complaining about the slowness, but I doubt the email had anything to do with it. Oh well, at least my download is complete.

I've had this layout finished for several hours, but I just now decided to use it. That last one was just too plain--the idea was cool, but the text covered up the best part, which left nothing to really see. At least with this one, you have a little eye candy (if you're into that kinda thing), plus an unobstructed view of all the text. I changed the font to Trebuchet MS, but I'm not sure that I'll keep it. Tahoma is a little more compact, and a little cleaner too.

The picture was taken Saturday evening at the junction of SR-31 and Miller Flat Road, near the top of Huntington Canyon. I had driven about 1/4 mile south of our campsite to take some pictures of the sunset, but all the traffic was causing a lot of dust to be kicked up and it was messing up all my pictures, so I drove up to the highway and took some pictures from there. I had a hard time deciding which picture to use--I had a lot of damned nice pictures to choose from.

It sounds to me like somebody down at the local paper is over-doing it just a little bit--here's an excerpt from a story about last week's hailstorm: "Many people?s flowers were completely stripped of petals and vegetables were pummeled with the hard rockets of ice as they cascaded from the heavens." Hard rockets of ice, huh? I think that's overly-dramatic. It hailed big time. Whoopteedoo.

Camping was pretty decent this weekend--it was worth going this time, at least. I still can't believe the sheer number of people that were camping in the same area as us, though. The road we were near was about as heavily travelled as the street in front of my house, which is pretty bad. Mike and Allison ended up just coming up for the day yesterday, but they stayed at our house last night, and just left a few hours ago. Ty and Mandi came over and we had a little barbeque this evening, which was quite nice. We should do that more often.

Michael has been sick all day today, so we've basically spent most of the day cleaning up puke. He seemed to be getting better for awhile there, but he puked again just before we bathed him and put him to bed. I really hope he's feeling better tomorrow, because Traci's taking him up to Provo with her for the day. I'm planning on pouring some more of that concrete walkway in my back yard over the next two days, but I don't actually feel up to it. I'd hate to put it off until it's too late in the year to finish it, so if I don't get it done this week, I'll end up working on it for an hour or two every day after work until it's finished.

I've put some more pictures up, mostly of our past two camping trips. Enjoy.